GERMANY V. RUSSIA.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1718, 31 March 1888, Page 2

GERMANY V. RUSSIA.

It is commonly taken for granted that if Germany and Russia meet in conflict the latter is certain to be defeated. Them is no sufficient reason for this belief. The Germau army has never been tried in a campaign such a& she would be cilleri upon to fight in Russia. Her victories over Austria and Prance are not precedents applicable to these new conditions. In the war of 1866 there can b» no doubt at all that sheconquered because the Prussians wero armed with the need V-gun, and the Aistrians were not. In France her victories were almost wholly doe to the fact that the French were handled not according to the principles of military strategy but on political gronnds>-i-to postpone as long as possible the deposition «f the Emperor. If MacMahon,. instead of leaving the camp at Chalons, to march to destruction, at Sedan, had* as hp wish to do, retired upon Paris, the entire aspect, and perhaps the issue of the war, would have been changed. Again, there can be no reasonable donbt that Bazaine was a traitor. There is n«t in all. military history anything so. infamous, so unspeakably base andj cowardly, as his conduct during the siege an 4 surrender st Metz. In this extraordinary campaign France beheld her whole effective army deliberately sold into the power of the enemy in. order to retain for a few days an imperial usurper on a tottering throne. Nothing at all resembling this is possible in a war against Kussia. There the Germans will hare to contend with, soldiers equal to them in stubborn ehdutance and tenacity, superior to them in numbers. As the Prussian Frederick once said, and as Napoleon found to bis cost—" You can kill a Russian soldier, but you cannot beat him." Napoleom had little difficulty in crushing the Prussian army at Jena, and Auerstadt; but at Eylao, on the Borodino, and again at Culm, he could make do> impression upon the persistent valor of the hardy Russian soldier. But this is not all. A campaign in Russia means, a strain upon the commissariat establishment of the German army to which if has never been exposed, and whioh it is ill-fitted to sustain. The advance apon Vienna in 1866, though made through a rich country, with good roads, proved too heavy a tax upon its resources; and the difficulties which it then had to confront would be as child's play compared with those of a Russian campaign. For our own part we believe Russia, standing on her own soil, is impregnable. The poverty of the country, the freezing climate, the vast unpeopled spaces, the: hardihood and fanatical patriotism of? her people ; these constitute a series of fortifications, as one might say, against which alt Europe in arms would fling itself in vain,—London Dispatch.